​Bio

Anchorage artist, Amy Meissner, combines traditional handwork, found objects and abandoned textiles to reference the literal, physical and emotional labor of women. Her background is in clothing design, illustration and creative writing, all of which combine in the cloth-based work she began in 2013 to initially address a conflicted mothering experience. Manipulating discarded household cloth to create 2-dimensional quilt-like forms and 3-dimensional objects serves as a cultural nod to the embroidery created by generations of Scandinavian women in her family, and confronts societal disregard and erasure of women’s handwork.

Amy’s work is traditional, fine and craft-based, relying on the repetitive nature of hand stitching to relay a manic and confrontational feminist subject matter. The work is approachable and tangible, its components even familiar, but challenges the viewer’s emotional history to convey layered messaging around femininity, motherhood and the value of women’s labor.

Statement

Hand stitching isn’t fast work. It’s a quiet skill that feels tenuous, nearly lost when placed in a contemporary context; it slips away like childhood, like domesticity, like safety beneath the weight of something handmade. I sew because I don’t know what it is to not sew, despite the connotation of “minor art” or “women’s work.” It’s this expectation of what the hand-sewn form is — protective, warm, decorative — so much like the definition of the domestic role, which compels me to heave against it. I take the traditional, beautiful handwork I was taught as a girl, then later as a professional seamstress and couch it within the painful, uncomfortable or frightening. My intent is to create thoughtful, arresting work, reliant on layers of narrative within the pieces themselves and within the history each viewer brings.

This is time-based work, using old skills. An act of cutting apart, then piecing oneself back together.